Those of a certain age may remember a time when groceries were always bagged at a grocery store checkout lane by a person whose whole job it was to pack groceries in the cuboid shape of a paper grocery bag, striking a balance between maximal use of the available space and making the final bag capable of being carried by the customer.
Times change, and stores gradually started to shift to cheaper plastic bags (often called t-shirt bags in the industry because of their shape prior to use). The question “paper or plastic” was asked thousands of times per day by bag-boys around the country. Some people, defeating the whole purpose of stores purchasing the lower cost plastic bags, would have a paper bag inserted into a plastic bag to have the structural support of a paper bag, and the convenient handles of a plastic bag.
Gradually, stores pushed harder to eliminate the paper bag option, some by charging a small amount for a paper bag while others would have convenient “shortages” of paper bags.
Eventually, paper bags became rarities, and eventually all but disappeared from the grocery store landscape, although their legend lives on, if no where but these last few paragraphs.
To a grocery store patron, the primary advantage of a t-shirt bag are the handles. The handles, however, lure the end user into carrying more heavily packed bags that can stress the grasp of the fingers coiled around them; the presence of handles also tempts the patron to carry more bags in each hand than may be prudent.
The plastic used for these bags (usually HDPE—High Density Polyethylene) is also carefully engineered to be as thin as possible while still achieving some minimum levels of tensile strength and tear resistance. Unfortunately, this also means that the bags themselves have very little structural stability and tend to fall over when placed down, potentially allowing some of it's cargo to slip loose and become wedged in hard to reach areas of the trunk of the consumer's car. A number of aids are known in the art that assist a person in carrying such grocery bags.
One such carrier is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,062,622 in which a plastic loop with a flattened finger-area is used to clasp one or more bags.
Another carrier design is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,056,344. That design comprises a disposable piece of material that can loop around the handles oft-shirt bags and that is held in place by interlocking ridges. Another design of a device for holding these types of bags is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. D480,645.
A common theme in the art is that of a some number of closed or open hooks on a rigid handle. Examples of this general theme can be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,347,822, D441,651, D440,492, D410,386, D380,670, D362,622, D336732, D137,712, 6,651,941, and 6,347,822.
The above is not meant to be an exhaustive listing of prior art patents, but merely demonstrative of the types of patents concerning carrying aids for t-shirt bags. Other art likely exists.
Although these carrying aids may be useful to some, they also have certain disadvantages. Many are inflexible and large enough that carrying them may be more of a bother than foregoing their use. Some of these also have pointed tips that could introduce other problems such as puncturing the bags intended to be carried, and possibly puncturing the user. Others, such as U.S. Pat. No. 6,056,344 are not meant to be reused and may not provide much meaningful protection from the bag handles. Further, due to their design, such carrying aids may not hold together, or hold onto the bag handles, when the bags are set down.